[rfiat]

As the sibling commentor said, syntax highlighting is only one example meant to illustrate Go's sometimes unnecessarily frustrating design. In case it wasn't clear, the example wasn't that Rob Pike doesn't like syntax highlighting. The example was that Go's playground doesn't have syntax highlighting (even as an option) for a reason as arbitrary as "because I said so".

That is why I find Rust and Go to be dissimilar. Rust is a language full of good ideas, almost all of which didn't originate in Rust. Go feels like it was designed with a very specific brief - "we want C but with GC and easy concurrency" - but whose designers otherwise had an NIH syndrome-like aversion to good ideas and common sense.

[throwaway17_17]

I don't agree with your framing. You are stating a 'moral' proposition, i.e. Rust == Good Ideas AND Go == Bad Ideas, and then applying the 'moral' position to the language as a whole. So you end up saying, in brief (and acknowledging that I do not think you are actually making a moral claim about the qualities of these languages) you are saying Rust is Good, Go is Bad and therefore they are dissimilar. I don't think the reasoning your putting forward actually says anything about the language and there similarity/dissimilarity.

I am not saying that Go and Rust are similar or not. I don't really agree with GP's comment where Go should be in the running for a Rust-with-GC/slightly-higher-level-Rust, but the frankly dismissive Rust Good therefore not similar to Go Bad is not justified. Although the conclusion regarding similarity is probably correct.

Also, this is a little off topic, but I have seen multiple people say that Go 'was designed with a very specific brief - "we want C but with GC and easy concurrency"' and then go on to complain about the lack of things like generics, destructuring match syntax, functional concepts, etc. But, all of those discussion, including your comment, start out with what seems to be an acknowledgement that Go's design had a very specific target. I agree that Go is basically the fulfillment of the brief you gave, i.e. C with GC and easy concurrency. So, when the target is C with two unique things, why does everyone then seem confused that Go doesn't have all of these extra 'good ideas and common sense'.

I'm not trying to turn this into a thread on Go's merits or lack thereof. I just don't understand why so many people seem to think that Go somehow didn't do exactly what it set out to do. You don't have to think what they decided to design was a worthwhile language, but to expect a lion to be a shark, or an apple be a steak, is just illogical.

[rfiat]

I appreciate your comment. My intention wasn't "Go is dissimilar because it's bad and Rust is good" but I can see why you'd think that. I'll attempt to clarify.

The reason I like and recommend Rust is the number of decisions it gets right which are completely orthogonal to the borrow checker. It's clear that a lot of thought was put into the unexciting parts of the language. That's why I like using it even though I don't particularly need the borrow checker and I'd be happy with GC. Some examples off the top of my head:

  - Expression-oriented nature makes code easy to write and nice to read
  - Compilation errors are as clear and helpful as possible
  - Comprehensive yet skimmable API documentation

In short, Rust is a nice language outside of the borrow checker.

A lot of the things which strike me as nice about Rust can't be said about Go. For that reason I think Go is a surprising suggestion for someone who likes Rust but doesn't care about ownership and lifetimes.

There are a number of minor but valid frustrations I encounter when writing Go which are completely orthogonal to the brief of "C but with GC and easy concurrency". I'd understand if these problems were a result of the language's goals but often they seem to exist for no particular reason. In that regard I think Go is quite dissimilar to Rust.

I hope that explains my viewpoint more clearly :)

[throwaway17_17]

You’re comment make your point very well. Honestly, so did the first comment. Sometimes I find myself so tired of just lurking and reading HN that I just text dump some comment onto a totally valid parent comment.